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from ABC News (& affiliates)
TV Network in New York, New YorkThe president said afterward he's "optimistic," but it's unclear why.
In a nearly one-hour call, President Joe Biden discussed ransomware attacks with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, saying afterward he was "optimistic" about communications between the two countries going forward. The discussion, their first since meeting in Switzerland last month for a major summit, comes days after another massive ransomware attack affected as many as 1,500 businesses around the world, according to the software vendor that was impacted. ... When asked what actions he wanted or expected Putin to take against the cyberattacks, Biden demurred. "It's not appropriate for me to say what I expect him to do now. But we'll see," The president told reporters.
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from Competitive Enterprise Institute
President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy today, which the White House claims is aimed at enhancing competition. The wide-ranging, unilateral action included many policy areas, including freight rail, airline fees, shipping, banking, antitrust, net neutrality, and occupational licensing. CEI: “Joe Biden’s new EO on ‘Promoting Competition in the American Economy’ does the opposite. It is an effort to consolidate sweeping government power over agriculture, airlines, banking, broadband, health, and the technology sector – a list that may prove non-inclusive. With some exception, only the government/business alliances will win, not the public. The limited areas in which the EO is deregulatory (over-the-counter hearing aids) are paltry.”
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from DW News (Deutsche Welle)
Broadcasting & Media Production Company in Bonn, Germany
Lithuania on Friday began putting up a fence along its border with Belarus after experiencing a recent massive influx of migrants coming from its neighbor. Vilnius has accused Belarusian authorities of encouraging the flow of migrants illegally into Lithuania, an EU member state, in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Belarus by the bloc over human rights abuses and other issues. More than 1,500 people have crossed into Lithuania from Belarus in the past two months — 20 times that seen in the whole of 2020.
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from HumanProgress.org
Education Website
Malaria, the most common disease spread by the mosquito, is a thing of the past in much of the developed world, but the parasite still infects some 200 million people a year – killing 400,000. Children aged under the age of five are most susceptible to malaria, accounting for a majority of the fatalities worldwide. In addition to the human suffering, malaria imposes huge economic costs on some of the poorest countries in the world – nine percent of the gross domestic product in Chad, for example. Mercifully, our most ancient enemy may have met its match. The COVID-19 pandemic sucked so much air out of the news cycle that relatively few people noted the emergence of an amazing new malaria vaccine. The injection infects people with “live Plasmodium falciparum parasites, along with drugs to kill any parasites that reached the liver or bloodstream, where they can cause malaria symptoms.” According to Nature magazine, “the vaccination protected 87.5 percent of participants who were infected after three months with the same strain of parasite that was used in the inoculation, and 77.8 percent of those who were infected with a different strain.”
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from Mises Institute
RIGHT-CENTER BIAS, MIXED
Woodrow Wilson's "Second Personality"
Woodrow Wilson's "Second Personality"
Wherever blame for the war might lie, for the immense majority of Americans in 1914 it was just another of the European horrors from which our policy of neutrality, set forth by the Founding Fathers of the Republic, had kept us free. Pašić, Sazonov, Conrad, Poincaré, Moltke, Edward Grey, and the rest—these were the men our Fathers had warned us against. No conceivable outcome of the war could threaten an invasion of our vast and solid continental base. We should thank a merciful Providence, which gave us this blessed land and impregnable fortress, that America, at least, would not be drawn into the senseless butchery of the Old World. That was unthinkable. However, in 1914 the president of the United States was Thomas Woodrow Wilson. The term most frequently applied to Woodrow Wilson nowadays is "idealist." In contrast, the expression "power-hungry" is rarely used. Yet a scholar not unfriendly to him has written of Wilson that "he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power." Musing on the character of the US government while he was still an academic, Wilson wrote: "I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive."1 Even before he entered politics, he was fascinated by the power of the presidency and how it could be augmented by meddling in foreign affairs and dominating overseas territories. The war with Spain and the American acquisition of colonies in the Caribbean and across the Pacific were welcomed by Wilson as productive of salutary changes in our federal system. "The plunge into international politics and into the administration of distant dependencies" had already resulted in "the greatly increased power and opportunity for constructive statesmanship given the President."
The United States’s jobs recovery is extremely poor, especially if we consider the size of the monetary and fiscal stimulus and the spectacular upgrade to GDP estimates. After a massive consensus increase in GDP recovery estimates to 6.5 percent in 2021, no one should be cheering a 5.9 percent unemployment rate, 58 percent employment-to-population ratio, and, even worse, a 61.6 percent labor force participation rate that has remained stagnant for ten months. Furthermore, Bloomberg Economics shows that the United States unemployment rate would be 8.4 percent excluding the participation decline. In the European Union, the employment situation is also a cause of concern. The United States’s jobs recovery is certainly strong only when compared with an extremely weak European jobs environment.
Minimum-wage laws are again in the news, as Joe Biden and his political allies in Congress seek to push the national minimum from its current level of $7.25 per hour up to $15 per hour. Some politicians, Sen. Bernie Sanders for one, declare that people can barely survive even on $15 per hour. If the law takes the minimum up to $15, we can expect pressure to raise it still further in the future. After all, why shouldn’t the government be compassionate and improve the lives of millions of low-wage workers? Many Americans think that’s one of the reasons for democracy—so that the government can respond to people’s needs.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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